1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of document storage systems and more particularly to a method and system of accessing and storing documents on a computer file system utilizing a file system-independent key for use in an index-less VoiceXML browser caching mechanism.
2. Description of the Related Art
In typical web-based programming models, resources, such as a document or a group of documents, are referenced by a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). However, the format of the URI does not always allow it to be easily used as a key for the identification and retrieval of documents on a traditional file system. In particular, there is often a discrepancy between the character values that are supported in the URI and the character values supported by the file system. Therefore, the global use of the URI as a key for a resource in a file system is not an optimal solution. The prior art has not adequately addressed the challenge of building an index-less key-to-resource solution that takes into account differences between the character value requirements supported by the URI and character value requirements in different operating systems.
Therefore, the challenge has become to leverage a file system's built-in ability to index a file quickly. Typically, a file-look up mechanism locates a file quickly because it has a built-in index system within the file system as part of the file system's native operating system. The key-to-resource look-up process is traditionally accomplished by building a higher-level index upon the process that permits the use of a variety of characters, and this higher-level index is used to find the file name on the file system. Thus, the URI is used to first look in a table that contains a variety of characters that could be in the key, and then the file on the file system is located. However, this process adds an unwanted level of indirection that should be avoided in order to leverage the file system directly. Table structure formats like those used in the prior art place a great burden on the system's memory and result in an inefficient document storage/retrieval system.
It is therefore desirable to have a method and system that uses a key for the identification and storage of documents in a traditional file system where the key is used as the file name, where multiple levels of indirection are eliminated and where the key-to-resource look-up process is portable across all file systems.